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Open Mic Spotlight: Ghe Rivero

This post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful. Each week, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun. If you’re interested in being featured, please choose five questions from this form and submit!

After ten years as a system administrator in a university data center, Ghe joined StackOps in early 2012 to work on a solution for managing your own clouds and those of third parties effortlessly with OpenStack. His first contributions to OpenStack can be traced back to 2011 in neutron project (quantum, by then) and working on the OpenStack Debian packaging team. After that, in late 2012, he became part of HP as a cloud automation and distribution engineer mainly focused in TripleO and Ironic projects. He works from home in Salamanca, Spain, and loves outdoor activities like hiking and cycling, photography and traveling. You can get in touch with him on Twitter at @GheRivero.

1) What drew you to OpenStack?

I first met OpenStack during a virtualization project for some web services. Plain virtualization was ok, but didn’t fulfill all of my desires. So while looking for cloud solutions, OpenStack crossed my path and I fell in love with it. It was free, open and having the backup of great companies was a plus. But what really caught my attention was a growing community willing to welcome new developers. The OpenStack community is one the most enthusiastic I’ve ever met, with all of us working for different companies and collaborating.

2) Where is your favorite place to code? In the office, at a local coffee shop, in bed?

It all depends on the task I’m dealing with. I love coding by night in my standing desk at home, but in office hours, I really like going to an old library. The silence and calm of the place help me to focus and forget about almost everything. I almost get locked in a couple of times because I lost track of time!

3) What does “open source” mean to you?

It’s the best place to start working on a project, be recognized for your efforts, work in community and share your knowledge and ideas. What I really like about is that in spite of it starting as a computer movement, it has spread to many others places. We can start talking about open culture, with the copyleft and creative commons licenses, open data, Wikipedia and all kind of siblings, and even open democracy with the Iceland’s new crowd-sourced constitution. Openness is everywhere, and the right way to do things. I can’t imagine where we’d be by now if someone would have patented the fire and started charging for it when it was discovered.

4) How did you learn to code? Are you self-taught or did you lear in college? On-the-job?

I learned some basic coding skills in college, but in my previous job as a sysadmin I was not very fond of that and tried to avoid it, and delegated as much as possible. After some pitfalls, I decided to take matters into my own hands and start working on some free software projects (GNOME desktop and Debian) and start learning not only about coding but also about community.

5) What new OpenStack projects do you think will have a significant impact on the cloud market in the next year?

OpenStack is a pretty mature project despite being only three years old, so the core functionality is the keystone for a growing ecosystem around it, but it’s getting more and more complicated to be installed and operated, so projects like TripleO and Ironic will have a great impact during the next year.